New York's Chinese: Living in 2 Worlds

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: February 20, 1988

In Flushing, Queens, some Chinese businessmen urge others to put up English signs, even though the bulk of their relatively affluent customers are Chinese. They suggest it might seem more neighborly.

Other Chinese, particularly the tens of thousands of recent newcomers to New York City, have no choice about what language they use. Unable to speak English, they are forced to fan out along the subway lines into Brooklyn and to commute to low-paying jobs in Chinatown restaurants and garment factories.

Such contrasts suggest the difficulty in characterizing New York City's Chinese community. What is certain this Chinese New Year is that definitive statements are as evanescent as the teapot's steam.

''What's exciting about this period of New York City history is that the Chinese are experiencing their most dynamic period ever,'' said John Kuo Wei Tchen, associate director of Queens College's Asian American Center. Wealth and Poverty

On one hand, banks are popping up like soybean sprouts in Chinatown and other Chinese neighborhoods as money from Hong Kong and Taiwan is sent to safe havens. On the other, the waves of new immigrants are overwhelmingly and desperately poor.

As firecrackers this week heralded the Year of the Dragon, the much-praised over-representation of Chinese youth in such elite groups as Westinghouse science winners and the Juilliard School of Music contrasts sharply with law-enforcement authorities' assertions that the Chinese have taken over the heroin business in the city.

A new, particularly disturbing development is a number of vicious protests by some Brooklynites against Chinese and other Asians who have been buying homes in their neighborhoods. ''People are beginning to fear the Chinese community because they don't understand it,'' said William D. Chin, program director of the Chinatown History Project.

Though there is clearly greater Chinese involvement in the city's civic life - in Flushing, Chinese businessmen this year paid for the community's Christmas lights - the Chinese have scored scant political success.

''The only thing we ever got elected was two Civil Court judges last year,'' said Virginia Kee, who herself lost a race for City Council in 1985. ''That's pretty sad, isn't it?''

The face of New York City's Chinese community, already the largest in the nation at about 300,000, is being drastically altered by the arrival of 1,400 newcomers a month.

But they have burst far beyond Chinatown, which itself has ballooned from 15,000 in a well-defined six-block area two decades ago to more than 100,000 sprawled over much of lower Manhattan.

''Stretch your imagination,'' said Brock L. Hor, manager of one of the three Citibank branches in Chinatown. ''Chinatown now goes river to river.'' And that is clearly just the beginning, as satellite Chinatowns blossom in other boroughs. Almost 6 of 10 Chinese in the city now live outside Manhattan.

Moreover, ''the Chinese population will spread throughout the surrounding region,'' said Frank Vardy, demographer for the City Planning Department.

The dynamic changes here have been fueled by wave upon wave of immigration to the United States, long known in China as the ''Mountain of Gold.'' From 236,084 in 1960, the nation's Chinese population is now estimated at more than a million.

Outside New York, the population surge has resulted in the expansion of Chinatowns in San Francisco and Chicago, and the building of new ones in Miami, Houston and San Diego. The creation of a ''suburban'' Chinatown in Flushing finds parallels in Monterey Park in Los Angeles and Oakland in the San Francisco Bay area.

But for all its expansiveness, New York's Chinese community remains difficult for outsiders to penetrate, much less make judgments about. Although the 1980 census showed that more than half of Chinatown's residents did not speak English well or at all, language is not the only reason that they are so insulated.

The Chinese well remember that they were long the only population group excluded from the United States because of race - first by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and later by other statutes - and some remain understandably distrustful. Some Prosperity, Some Frustration

Liang Hun is a 59-year-old garment worker. He remembers his thoughts in 1984 upon arriving here from China's Guangdong Province.

''My first feeling was that my whole family has freedom now,'' he said. ''We can open up factories and prosper.''

Working 11 or 12 hours every day of the week in a garment factory, Mr. Hun pursued his American dream. His wife and three of his four children did the same thing. The youngest, a 15-year-old son, reported to the garment factory after school.

The dream was hardly fulfilled. Since being mugged in a subway station, Mr. Hun commutes to Chinatown from the Borough Park section of Brooklyn in fear. He has seen his income as an expert presser erode by a third because of growing foreign competition. Retirement, he says, will be a financial impossibility.

Mr. Hun's story is echoed elsewhere. But striking contrasts also exist. ''Everything's good,'' said Tony Lee, a native of Hong Kong who arrived in Chinatown in 1980 looking for work as a waiter. Mr. Lee now owns one restaurant in Chinatown and last month opened another in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn.

''I don't have time to learn English,'' he said. ''I'm too busy making money.''

But Peter Kwong, author of a new book, ''The New Chinatown,'' said the overwhelming majority of immigrants are trapped in what amounts to a Chinese ghetto.